A top Stanford officer given 3-year sentence

Laura Pendergest Holt, right, former chief investment officer for Stanford Financial Group Co., arrives at the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse for sentencing in Houston, Texas, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2012. She was the third-highest-ranking executive in the financial services firm that Texas financier R. Allen Stanford built on what the U.S. said was a Ponzi scheme based on bogus offshore bank certificates. Photographer: Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg ***Local Caption***Laura Pendergest Holt

Laura Pendergest Holt, right, former chief investment officer for Stanford Financial Group Co., arrives at the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse for sentencing in Houston, Texas, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2012. She was the third-highest-ranking executive in the financial services firm that Texas financier R. Allen Stanford built on what the U.S. said was a Ponzi scheme based on bogus offshore bank certificates. Photographer: Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg ***Local Caption***Laura Pendergest Holt

Laura Pendergest-Holt, who rose through the ranks to become chief investment officer under convicted swindler R. Allen Stanford, is headed to prison for obstructing the fraud investigation that brought down the global investment empire.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge David Hittner sentenced Pendergest-Holt to three years in prison, followed by three years of supervised probation. Hittner dismissed 20 other counts against her, in line with a plea bargain agreement she reached with federal prosecutors.

A tearful and trembling Pendergest-Holt, 39, appeared before Hittner in June to plead guilty - just one week after Hittner sentenced her former boss, Stanford, to 110 years, all but certain to be a life sentence for the 62-year-old convict.

With her plea agreement in hand, she acknowledged obstructing the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

"I knew I was delaying the SEC," she said.

At the close of Thursday's hearing, Pendergest-Holt was taken into custody to begin serving her prison term.

The government values the global Stanford fraud at $5.9 billion in worthless certificates of deposit issued by Stanford International Bank in the Caribbean nation of Antigua, plus $1.3 billion in fictitious interest.

Pendergest-Holt joined Stanford Financial Group, an international financial services company based in Houston, as a research analyst at age 23, testimony showed. With a master's degree in mathematics, she received a series of promotions until she became chief investment officer in the spring of 2005.

During Stanford's criminal trial earlier this year, his former chief financial officer, James Davis, testified that he had met Pendergest-Holt as a teenager at the Baptist church in Mississippi where he taught a Bible class. He said he hired her at Stanford Financial about eight years later and he had an affair with her that lasted three years.

The criminal complaint against her describes a meeting of Stanford executives in early 2009, during which Pendergest-Holt agreed to give the SEC false testimony about the values of certain investments as the agency was closing in on Stanford International Bank and other Stanford operations.

"Holt corruptly took this action knowing that her testimony would impede the SEC's investigation of SIB, with the intention of delaying the SEC's attempts to secure testimony from Davis and Stanford, and in an effort to help SIB to continue operating," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Varnado said at the time of her guilty plea.

Varnado also noted that $350,000 of Pendergest-Holt's personal assets have been seized by a receiver appointed to recover what he can for defrauded Stanford investors.

Davis also has pleaded guilty and could be sentenced to as many as 30 years in prison for his crimes.

Two other Stanford co-defendants, former global controller Mark Kuhrt and former accounting chief Gil Lopez, are scheduled for a joint trial in Hittner's court on Oct. 1. Another defendant, Antiguan regulator Leroy King, awaits extradition.